A year of credibility erosion

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This year was marked by a a precipitous erosion of the United States' credibility abroad. Sadly, the Obama administration doubled-down on its gamble that the United States can safely relinquish American military preeminence and conciliate rather than deter America's adversaries.

China's prodigious military buildup proceeded relentlessly while American defense spending and the size of the U.S. navy declined steadily. Russia initiated a major modernization of its ballistic missile forces while the Obama administration eviscerated research on and deployment of missile defense. Under cover of an unenforceable arms control agreement, the U.S. became more vulnerable to the blandishments of a revolutionary Iranian regime on the threshold of a nuclear breakout capability.

An authoritarian expansionist China, Putins's neo-Czarist Russia and an Islamist Iran have emerged as 2013's big winners. Conversely, the U.S. and its democratic allies top the list of the biggest losers. The Obama administration willfully enabled the year's most perilous developments.

Start with the deterioration of the American position in East Asia, the world's most important geopolitical region militarily, politically and economically. The administration's passivity towards China's mounting arrogance and assertiveness demolished the credibility of the “Asian Pivot” that the administration announced with great fanfare in 2012. In August, the Chinese Communist Party published the ominous Document No. 9 vilifying constitutional democracy and human rights. Even the left-leaning New York Times notes this memorandum reflects the thinking of China's new top leader Xi Jinping. Yet the administration marinated in denial, ranking climate change as a greater danger to American interests in Asia than Chinese ambitions.

In October, Chinese prestige soared while America's plummeted when the Obama administration skipped two major summits in Asia because of the budget crisis the president helped precipitate. 2013 ended with America's democratic allies in East Asia reeling from China's defiant declaration of a no fly zone in the East China Sea and from the Obama administration's flaccid response. Doubts intensified in these vital democratic allies about the Obama administration's fortitude and foresight credibly to contain an authoritarian China bent on achieving hegemony in East Asia, as the Obama administration continued to neglect India and Japan while courting China.

This year also exposed the fatuousness of the Obama administration's reset with an authoritarian Vladimir Putin, who seeks to revive a Russian Empire encompassing central Europe. The Obama administration has watched supinely as Putin has bribed and intimidated Ukraine to renege on an agreement with the European Union that would give that long suffering country a genuine chance to become part of the prosperous democratic West. Instead, Putin achieved what he wanted, lending Ukraine $15 billion, offering a 33 percent gas price cut, chaining Ukraine to Russia and subverting the long-term interests of Ukraine as well as the West. Americans will come sorely to regret this outcome. Putin transforming Ukraine into a vassal state will magnify Russian capabilities and imperial ambitions.

In the Middle East, Russia also ended the year in a stronger position at the expense of the United States and its allies. Putin brokered an agreement under the auspices of a perennially gridlocked United Nations shielding Syrian client Bashar al-Assad from the consequences of violating the Obama administration's multiply issued “red lines” against the use of chemical weapons. Putin gulled President Barack Obama into reaching an agreement with Iran facilitating the determination of the Iranian regime to enrich uranium and build nuclear weapons while raising the barriers to a decisive response. The president's vacillations and retreats on Syria and Iran have enraged Saudi Arabia and alarmed our decent democratic Israeli ally. An unbridled nuclear arms race in the world's most volatile region looms near.

Nor did 2013 go well in the rest of the Middle East. Violence in Iraq has surged to the highest level in five years because of the Obama administration's premature withdrawal. Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan continued to move the country in an anti-American, Islamist direction. Throughout the Islamic Middle East, Arab Spring has turned into Arab Winter, with the prospects for stable liberal democracy receding everywhere.

Meanwhile, the president's obliviousness about the threat of radical Islam again made a bad situation worse in Egypt. In September, the administration further antagonized the Egyptian regime, cutting aid as punishment for the military's toppling and repressing a virulently anti-Western, anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood intent on transforming the country into a Sunni version of Iran under the ayatollahs. Yet this Egyptian regime offers the least repressive, least anti-American, least anti-Israeli alternative in a country where no plausible liberal democratic alternative exists for the foreseeable future.

Unless the Obama administration experiences an epiphany about the perils of appeasement, the virtues of vigilance and the imperative of standing by democratic allies, the year 2014 may be filled with even more dangers.

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